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That's what TAI is for. Too bad nobody got the memo and everybody stores and communicates UTC, including computer clocks, UNIX time and NTP.

There will be no more leap seconds after 2035, AFAIK.

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Sure. So my argument is that everything should use TAI, and local time zones should be an offset from TAI, not UTC (because local times are primarily for humans, and humans don't care about extremely slow time zone drift that leap seconds are designed to prevent). Then we can abolish UTC entirely since it serves no purpose.

The problem isn't really about handling local time. UTC is an offset from TAI and time zones are offsets from UTC, it's overall really just an offset from TAI. Coordinating the TAI-UTC offset is not any worse than coordinating time zone offsets.

The complications are around clocks, UNIX timestamp and NTP, where a steadily and monotonously increasing number would make the most sense, and that's not UTC.

Good news, the 2038 Unixtime mess should give some impetus on cleaning this all up before then.

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